Among the Few

A lorry full of wooden barrels smashes through a Home Guard checkpoint and is chased down the road until it leaves the road and explodes, killing its driver. The barrels were full of stolen petrol, and the wreck exposes an illicit fuel racket drawing on the area's one centralised depot at Bexhill. With no undercover officer to hand, Foyle does something he has not done before: he lets his driver go in. Sam Stewart has mechanical training as well as a driver's qualification, and she enters the depot as a new recruit, training under an experienced tanker driver, Connie Dewar, and absorbed into the social life of dances, servicemen and the neutral Irish labourers working alongside them.

At one of these gatherings Sam is astonished to find Foyle's son, Andrew, now flying fighter patrols over France; his best friend, and Connie's boyfriend, is another pilot, Rex Talbot. Andrew is guarded and hostile, because he is secretly engaged to a third member of the group, Violet Davies, and does not want his father to know. Sam notices an irregularity at the depot, that Connie fails to empty her tanker fully before returning it, and before anything can be done about it, Connie is found dead at the bottom of the stairs at her guesthouse. She was four months pregnant, and the father was the local nightclub manager, a racketeer tied to the thefts. The racket itself is being organised not by the depot manager but by his wife, Pamela Bennett, whose part the enquiry exposes. Sam's search of the depot safe nearly kills her when a bomb is carried into the office while she is working.

The death is not the work of the racketeers. Connie Dewar died because of Rex Talbot. He had been using his relationship with her as cover for a concealed attachment to Andrew, and what happened on the stairs grew out of the pressure of keeping that hidden; the sources describe it as an accident rather than a killing, and Talbot confesses. Foyle does not prosecute. In deference to the needs of the war and to his own son, he allows Talbot to lead the squadron on one last sortie before any reckoning, and Talbot is killed flying it. Foyle then tells Andrew that Talbot was a good man, a mercy rather than a judgment, and the film ends on the Foyle family rather than on the racket.

The strength is that refusal to punish. Foyle chooses mercy for his son's friend over the letter of the law, and the series lets the choice stand, which compromises his professional role for a personal one in a way the run returns to. The weakness is that the fuel racket has several participants and its resolution arrives late, so a viewer can be left unsure how much of the theft mattered once the death took over. What distinguishes the film is how directly it handles Talbot's motive, stated rather than moralised, which was unusually plain material for a Sunday-night drama. It is also the first time a regular's family is the true centre of a case, and the longest undercover stretch Sam is given.